I’ve seen this meme floating around a bit today on Facebook (h/t Jason), even though it’s from an article dated March 22, 2014. I wanted to set a few things straight about it. (This is adapted from a Facebook comment I left.)

The meme shows a picture of Massachusetts State Senator Richard Ross, and names him Asshole of the Day for March 22, 2014. It then states, “Proposed a bill to make women going through divorce get a judge’s permission to date or have sex.”

First of all, Sen. Ross introduced the bill at the request of a constituent, apparently based on a Massachusetts procedural rule that allows anyone to introduce legislation. The senator has stated that he does not actually endorse the bill, so I guess I really don’t understand how Massachusetts does legislating.

The meme is misleading because it only mentions women going through a divorce, and it does not mention anything about the bill only applying to divorces with children. The bill is terrible, but not for the reasons stated by the Asshole of the Day site. The change made by the bill would apply to both men and women….at least on paper. This is actually a relatively common feature of divorces with kids, in my experience (with some very important differences I’ll discuss below). Here’s the text of the amended provision:

In divorce, separation, or 209A proceedings involving children and a marital home, the party remaining in the home shall not conduct a dating or sexual relationship within the home until a divorce is final and all financial and custody issues are resolved, unless the express permission is granted by the courts.

The idea behind this, in Texas at least, is to keep the kids’ situation reasonably stable while the divorce is pending—in Texas that’s a minimum of 60 days from the filing date, but in some states it’s as much as 6-12 months. Having new significant others around while the divorce is still pending, the theory goes, is not in the “best interest of the children” (which is the gold standard in every state that I know of.)

Now, in practice, is this a good idea to have as a statute covering all divorces with children? Hell no. It assumes that children need to be shielded, and can be shielded, from the grittier details of a divorce in all cases, and that’s not remotely correct. Note that the bill doesn’t make distinctions between infants (who don’t care), the toddler-to-tween range (who would probably be the most affected), and teenagers (the wildcard).

Also, in practice, would this be evenly applied to men and women? Abso-freaking-lutely not. Our family law system is a ridiculous hodgepodge of gender assumptions. For example, men’s rights activists are right that women are more likely to get custody in divorce cases, but that’s because women are still presumed to be the caregivers while the men are out making money (or killing mammoths, or whatever). There’s no legislative way to fix that, because it pretty much has to be left to the discretion of judges who actually know what is going on (or what the lawyers have told them is going on.) The same ought to go for injunctions on dating/etc. relationships.

Note that the provision specifically says no “dating or sexual relationship within the home.” Under the most charitable interpretation of the bill, all it is really saying was don’t bring your ladyfriend/fella home until the divorce is finalized. In many divorce cases, that’s sort of a classy move, but not in all cases (e.g. where the parties have been separated already for years and might have already brought significant others home). It certainly shouldn’t be law. There’s still a problem, though: The bill only applies to the party who remains in the home. This only makes any sort of sense if the kids are also remaining in the house, but it doesn’t specify that. If the kids go to live with Grandma until the divorce blows over, whoever stays in the house is still prohibited by state law from gettin’ it on in a kid-free house.

The clauses that I have seen in temporary orders that are similar to this bill apply to both parents, and they say that each parent will refrain from having significant others around the children. There was nothing specific about the “marital home,”  but rather whatever home the children were occupying. If the kids lived with Mom most of the time, Mom could have someone over when the kids were over at Dad’s, and vice versa. It’s not appropriate in every case, but it was an okay idea in some cases. The Massachusetts bill is just a bad idea.

Getting back to problems with the meme (ass opposed to the bill), the creator of the meme seems to be assuming that the wife is the one who remains in the house, which is not always the case. They also seem to be assuming that all marriages with kids in Massachusetts involve at least one woman. Massachusetts made history, remember?

The bill is still pending in the Massachusetts Senate as of today, by the way.